An analyst may want to monitor a set of users or a set of online identities associated with the set of users to observe their behavior online. The analyst may already be monitoring a set of known users of the communication network. The analyst may have previously identified a set of known users based on a set of identifier characteristics. The analyst may also be interested in locating other new users or new online identities of interest based on a set of desired identifier characteristic. The analyst may be interested in finding other users based on a set of desired characteristics or a type of project he may be working on. The analyst may be interested in understanding and studying a whole set of online behavior associated with the user or online identity associated with a person of interest. The analyst may want to study a set of communication and transaction data created and exchanged between a known user of interest of the communication network and a new user of interest. The analyst may want to collect a set of data belonging to the user of interest and/or a new user of interest to study a particular pattern in behavior. The analyst may also want to understand a set of interactions between the user of interest and a user not currently of interest or a new user of interest. Similarly, the analyst may seek content and metadata communicated between users on a wide variety of communication systems and formats. This information can be useful for determining commercial, investment, and personal information and relationships between the users or online identities and persons at large.
A network monitoring system may be required to monitor a set of activity between users and/or online identities associated with a set of persons. Some users of a communication system may be easily identifiable. However, other users of a communication system may be of interest, but may not yet be identified or provisioned easily. These users and/or online identities may be difficult to locate, and analysts may have a difficult time finding links between existing online identities and other potential online identities manually. Finding links between known users and new users or online identities related to the known user users may be time-consuming and inefficient task. In addition to being cumbersome and inefficient, it may also be financially expensive to identify new users of interest manually.
Such systems of network monitoring can be very expensive to purchase or lease due to the high development and design costs required for the sophisticated algorithms and software as well as the high-performance hardware, server infrastructure and other system features. There may be multiple analysts who may be part of various organizations, or agencies that may each want to monitor their own list of users that are of interest to them. These analysts from different agencies may want to use their own individual management protocol, judgment, and techniques for network monitoring and data gathering. However, sometimes these different agencies might be tracking the same users of interest and retrieving the same collection and transaction data without knowing it. But because each agency, organization or analyst has to maintain confidentiality of its work, the agency may typically have to have its own monitoring system. However, it can be very expensive for each individual agency, many with a limited budget, to purchase and maintain a system by itself. Sometimes purchasing or maintain a network monitoring system can be cost prohibitive, resulting in inferior, or severely handicapped, monitoring, collecting, and/or analyzing of data, Additionally, multiple different network carriers sometimes use the same backbone fiber routes to communicate data. If a network monitoring system has to be purchased for each carrier, then there might be duplicative resources tapping along the same route.